You should frankly drop your "jobs" section rather than use a crappy one

The BBQ Pit
1

Seriously, I am sick of the number of times I’ve seen god-awful online applications. First, people have and apply to a lot of jobs these days. If your website says insipid crap like, “Please list all jobs you have held.,” you will not, in fact, get such a list. You will get whatever is convenient. In one case, I applied, filled in that long list until it wouldn’t allow me any more, and then the idiot HR person whined that I hadn’t completely filled it out with every job I’ve ever held.

Answer? DUH! Of course, I’m not going to fill it out if you won’t let me!

I’ve generally been disgusted by how they got rid of any human contact in favor of awesomely lazy crap methods, like dumping a bunch of resumes in a file and looking for keywords.

Newsflash: that tells you who is using some “professional” resume service fuilled with meaningless buzzwords which probably don’t describe their experience anyway, not who might be of use.

It also gets obnoxious when you demand people fill out your tedious, utterly generic work history sections without actually letting us auto-complete with a resume-stripper.

The most annoying part? You never actually looka t the damn thing. If I get called into an interview, it’s invariably the first time anyone bothered to look, and you have your crappy form just printed straight on the web. Why the hell did you bother? You wasted my time and yours. Just have me fax it in if you’re too lazy to do anything of use. It can take hours to fill out a badly-designed form. Plus, every goddam company thinks it needs to force users to create accounts.

Need I say how stupid this is? You wind up with a bunch of meaningless accounts sitting around, and in the end, it doesn’t mean anything. Anyone can create accounts by the dozen if they’re so inclined, and there’s no reason to do so.

Gah! I wouldn’t care if there was more than a snowball’s chance I’d get the job. And I wouldn’t care if it actually meant keeping the riff-raff out (meaning other people who want the job). But mostly, it justs makes me question whether or not I even want to bother applying. If you suck this bad at such a simple thing, and you’re too dimwitted to do anything except copy-cat every other corporate HR moron, why do I want to work at your company?

On a similar note, I have never found anyone in any company so useless as HR people. They basically have no reason except to take the most important work and shovel. it off into a department on tis own. I’ve yet to see one of these women ask a pertinent question, while they seem to hold an awful lot of (meaningless) power. In theory, an HR department should be absolutely critical to a company’s growth and success. But I’ve never seen on which was anything more than a glorified cattle auction.

2

Yep. The internet is ideal for making things like this easier for everyone, but for some reason these dipshits go out of their way to fuck it up.

Honestly, I’m about to bypass the whole applying online process entirely. I’ve had better luck with slot machines.

3

Back when I was searching for a job, one company made me fill out an online form, and send in a cover letter and CV. In duplicate.

4

For truth (except for that ‘in theory’ part - I don’t think they are critical, even in theory).

I don’t have much experience at many different companies, but in those I have worked with the HR people (who are not fee earners, by the way) have been responsible for getting rid of good people and blocking potentially good people from joining, simply because they don’t know anything about the business aspect of business (you know, that kind of important part that has to do with getting and keeping good clients).

5

Did you write it by hand on a piece of foolscap?

6

Yeah, that just pisses me off.

“OK, first you’ve got create an account. And now enter the data for your last job! Here’s a field for the date. Here’s a field for the company name. Here’s a field for their address. Here’s a field for your immediate supervisor. Here’s a field for your immediate supervisor’s phone number. Here’s another dozen mandatory fields that you have to copy and paste from your resume. Got all that? Oh, you missed one. Go back and fill it in. OK, you’ve spent 20 minutes doing this? Great! Now you get to do the exact same thing for the next job on your resume. And the next and the next! Thank Christ you don’t work in the software industry where people change jobs frequently and you have a dozen jobs you could list!”

How about you just have a place where I can copy and paste a plain text version of my resume, since you’re just going to scan them all for key words anyway? Because you sure as fuck aren’t going to be searching the database, “Steve, I want you to pull up all resumes in our database that list General Products as their last job and also have a home address in the 98070 zip code.” And even if you wanted this info, you could just search the goddam text of the resumes.

I guess the reasoning must be, “Well, we only want applicants who care enough about our company to spend an hour navigating our online application process”. Except a minute of thought would show this can’t possibly work. Especially since it seems like just about every online job offer is pretend. You want thousands of people to each spend an hour filling out your online form, and then you’re just going to ignore it all anyway.

7

I had one of these recently that wouldn’t let me submit the form without including a state. The last two jobs I had were in India and Bulgaria. I tried entering AP, for Andhra Pradesh, the state in India where I worked, but of course that didn’t work.

I ended up giving up.

8

That’s my favorite. AS IF I only had one supervisor at every job, and they’re all still at the same phone number.

9

I usually call the H.R. department the “Department of Denial”. I have had more than a few instances where I was trying to get a job posting for some of my students, and was forced to go through the HR department of an organization. HR in a couple of cases specifically forbade me from talking to the individuals in the organization who actually wanted to manage and supervise the students. (even though I knew them personally and professionally). The postings never came. And never came. Finally I broke down and called my associate at the organization.

They were told by HR that “no students were interested in your position”
I was told by HR that “no manager wants to hire a student”

I found out later that HR did not like anyone at their organization hiring students, because it caused extra paperwork for the HR folks. And they wonder why their recruitment drives for new hires are a complete and utter failure.

10

A little imagination goes a long way: IN (Indiana for India) and VI (Virgin Islands for Bulgaria). Then when questioned about the obvious discrepancy in the interview you display your sparkling sense of humor with quippy comments like “close enough” and “opposites in every sense of the word,” without hopelessly disparaging their web forms.

That way they see you are smart enough to get past their stupid web forms while not being an ass about it in the process. :wink:

11

As if someone is actually going to look over the resume for discrepancies, except if you somehow got an interview. And even then, the interviewer is only going to glance at the printout for a few seconds right before they walk into the interview room.

12

I’ve had fun before trying to explain to HR people that I simply can’t remember the name of my supervisor at a summer job I had five years ago, and even if I could remember it, there’s no way they’re going to remember me.

Otherwise, I’m completely on board with the OP’s rant.

13

Oh yeah. I’m on board with this rant.

It’s as if the designer of these applications has never had any experience looking for a job or even working in a job.

Prior employer contact info? After several years, none of my them are around anymore. They’ve been through mergers after merger. How do I explain that I can give you info for the new HQ, but it’s in a completely different state from where I worked and they’re going to answer the phone using a completely different name. Plus I have no idea if they have employee records for a company they purchased that purchased a company that purchased my company. Given that one of those ultimate acquirers was recently in the news for failing to keep hold of customer mortgage documentation, it’s doubtful.

Former supervisors have long since moved on. I understand the importance of networking and keeping in touch with people, but after 10+ years, you start to lose touch. Moreover, one of them has died. That may seem like an unusual circumstance, but I don’t think it really is when they require you to list *every *company you’ve *ever *worked for and your supervisors. If it’s going on 15-20 years, there are going to be some deaths!

If they did something as simple as include an additional open ended field you could use to provide some explanation, that would help. That way I could explain that company XYZ was ultimately purchased by ABC and the supervisor is now at EFG (or deceased).

14

My previous employer had an internal referral service on HR’s intranet site, where existing employees could submit resumes of people they’d worked with previously, or knew personally and knew of their work skills, etc.

After enough people did this and never heard anything about it afterwards, it was looked into. It was discovered that HR immediately deleted those submissions b/c it made their new hire statistics look slightly worse. That discovery got the HR VP fired.

BTW, my employer was the largest software company in the world. I can’t fathom how HR thought no employee would be able to figure out what they were doing. By using, you know, the software tool the employees created themselves.

15

Oh, fuck YESSS. This is incredibly annoying and has driven me to give up on job applications simply because their process is so fucking retarded. And I also want to call the company and tell them that they are driving away potentially good employees because their application is so goddamned stupid. I would pay to see how the intricate input of information on this side leads to improved results or a better screening process on theirs.

16

Yeah, I could have done that. I didn’t care enough, I guess.

17

I agree. And frankly if you’re applying for most white collar jobs (and really, most blue collar jobs as well), I don’t how pertinent it is to list that McJob you had when you were 16. Depending on how old you are, chances are your manager from that place, as well as pretty much everyone else who worked with you, is long gone.

Another huge pet peeve from when my wife and I have applied online is the huge ass questionnaires they make you fill out. You know what I’m talking about, the ones that ask questions like “What would you do if you saw someone stealing at work,” and “How do other people rate your trustworthiness.” Honestly, do HR people take these questionnaires into consideration, or even look at them at all?

18

If I want to apply for a position within the same organization I already work for, do I walk across the street and talk to HR? No. Do I call the department head and inquire about the job? No.

No, the only way to start the process is to apply for the job online. Even if it is in the same building, for the same boss.

Yes, it is government work, why do you ask? :smiley:

19

Technology only disguises a fundamental truth. It’s friends and acquaintances that get you jobs.

20

I don’t work for any government and I have to do the same thing. My department head has already told me he’s going to promote me but I still have to apply for the job online through HR.